As its 10th anniversary approaches this Halloween, Car Seat Headrest’s EP “How to Leave Town” remains a contender for the Virginia-based band’s zenith.
Prior to Matador Records signing them and launching the Bandcamp project into indie stardom, Car Seat Headrest was primarily the work of one man, Will Toledo. Although much of his earlier material revolved explicitly around his interests in queer and furry subcultures, Toledo’s songwriting by 2014 had matured and grown more universal, even if the lyrics could still dive into the anxiety-inducing specifics of his disintegrated relationships.
“How to Leave Town” begins with both a bang and a whimper all at once. “The Ending of Dramamine” introduces itself through a lengthy minimalist jam, combining lo-fi drum machines and swirling synth pads in a chugging five-minute buildup that cuts into an even softer, even more dynamic song section.
The lyrics here correspond heavily to the titular theme of leaving town, reflecting Toledo’s own move across the United States to Seattle a year prior. Further than that, however, the young lyricist uses the move itself as a larger metaphor sweeping over the record for the dissolution of a relationship.
As he sings on the desolate outro before another lengthy jam to conclude this fourteen-minute epic, “When night fell on Montana, I found a rest stop completely deserted but I still felt the eyes upon me and so I drove away.” This double entendre runs throughout the following “Beast Monster Thing (Love Isn’t Love Enough),” exploring the ennui and misery inherent to living with one’s parents and avoiding self-care and self-love.
Elsewhere, songs like “Kimochi Warui,” named for the final line in the anime film ‘The End of Evangelion,’ and “America (Never Been)” relate these tumultuous feelings through Brian Wilson’s mental illness and the disintegration of the American dream, respectively. Sonically, these two songs help develop the meat of the album, bringing in influences as wide-ranging as spacey chillwave textures and 90s Miami bass rhythms a la 2 Live Crew.
As this ludicrously long EP reaches its final trilogy of tracks, its length of nearly an hour could start to wear thin for some, with only the two minute half-rapped intermission “Is This Dust Really from the Titanic?” lacking the multi-part structure Toledo clearly adored in 2014.
Often considered one of his songwriting masterpieces, “I Want You to Know That I’m Awake / I Hope That You’re Asleep” contains some of his most direct and honest lines to date, culminating in a heartbreakingly futile refrain of “We’re not like them, no we’re nothing like them.”
In this Car Seat Headrest fan’s opinion, however, it is the eleven minute closer “Hey, Space Cadet! (Beast Monster Thing in Space)” that may be Toledo’s peak as not just a songwriter, but a crafter of chords and melodies.
The slowly rising momentum brought to this dirge-like piece through Toledo’s tired-sounding vocals and the fuzzy lo-fi guitar textures help sell the exhausted emotions he feels in his attempts at real human connection.
Since the release of “How to Leave Town” and the band’s transition from noisy lo-fi guitar pop to hi-fi studio indie rock, the EP, meant originally as a stopgap between albums “Nervous Young Man” and “Teens of Denial,” has maintained its position near or at the top of most Car Seat Headrest rankings, and it’s not hard to hear why.
Between the brutal honesty, the clever usage of metaphors, and the sheer number of hooks, “How to Leave Town” holds universal qualities that are hard to deny.
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